by Claudia Ciobanu
“I arrived at the Copernicus monument at around nine in the evening, and I was just speaking to people when suddenly a group of policemen appeared. One of them – maybe the commander – pointed to me and then two came and took me by the arm,” recounted 52-year-old Malgorzata Rawinska, one of the 48 people arrested Friday night in Warsaw during a protest in solidarity with an LGBT activist who has been jailed for two months.
“I was flabbergasted so I didn’t defend myself. I was asking on what basis they are arresting me, but they didn’t reply. Then people around started shouting I was a journalist, so the police got confused,” she said.
Rawinska hosts an online radio show and, at the time of her arrest, she was going around interviewing people about the events surrounding LGBT activist Margot S’s arrest earlier on Friday. But she’s an amateur journalist, so she couldn’t show a badge to prevent the police from detaining her.
Like the other 47 arrested on Friday night, she was released over the weekend after spending the night in jail, but is now facing up to three years in prison for, in the words of the charge sheet, “taking part in a mob, with the knowledge that its participants will join forces to violently attack a person or property.”
“I have been an activist for equality and human rights for over 30 years, but never in my life have I been as afraid as I am now,” Rawinska told BIRN following her release from prison. “What happened on Friday is a kind of greenlight to shout at us and attack us.”
“My face was on TV, so I am afraid – to go out with the dogs, to go shopping. But I will continue to be active, nevertheless. You cannot be silent; you cannot be indifferent,” she added.
The “Polish Stonewall”
Rawinska’s determination to fight for her rights is echoed by other activists, who say that Friday’s events have revealed a “new rainbow solidarity” and anti-LGBT actions by the government and its allies are likely to receive a stronger pushback from now on. “I think it’s in the Polish genes that when something bad happens, we flex our muscles and fight it off. We saw it with the Solidarity movement or martial law – the more the government pressures us, the more we will fight back,” Bart Staszewski, a prominent LGBT activist who was part of the protests on Friday, told BIRN.
The events of Friday night follow a two-year period in which the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) has campaigned in local, European, parliamentary and presidential elections on what has amounted to an anti-LGBT platform. On the electoral trail this summer, for example, President Andrzej Duda said LGBT did not stand for people, but for an ideology that was “more destructive” than communism. Read more via Balkan Insight